Inter-not: Piss-poor WiFi annoys everyone

WiFi outages recently left Victoria University students staring at the Chrome dinosaur. The outages, which began on Thursday 16th April have continued for the last two weeks.

Issues occurred when the newly introduced wireless router rebooted itself over the weekend of Saturday 18 April. This meant the access points, which students connect their devices to, were without stable connections, and often went offline altogether.

Victoria has advised Salient that issue with the WiFi was raised with IBM/Cisco whose hardware Victoria uses.

Unfortunately the problem continued throughout the week. Cisco identified the cause as a bug in the version of software Victoria was running. ITS then uploaded a fix, which required a reboot that occurred at 1.00am on 21 April.

ITS spokesperson Peter Borich advised VUWSA President Rick Zwaan on 20th April that if the issue continued, they would have to manually reboot the server, but this would be a last resort.

The University assured Salient that there have been no further issues since the reboot.

Students however, remain dismayed at the lack of reliable Wifi connection. One disgruntled posted a photo on Overheard @ Vic showing students had changed their device names to ‘vic wifi is shit’ and ‘fuck u Vic wifi [sic]’, one photo received over 1469 likes.

Third year student Madeline Leighton told Salient that the WiFi outages had “stopped her from doing everything” as she was unable to connect to websites she needed for university work. While on a lighter note, student Nicole Richardson told Salient that the WiFi disruptions had only slightly inconvenienced her daily routine of checking Taylor Swift’s instagram.

The University currently spends $29m annually to provide ITS services (salaries included).

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The student magazine of Victoria University of Wellington. Salient is available on campus free each Monday during term. Funded in part by Victoria University of Wellington students, through the Student Services Levy.